Exploring the association between rail transit investments and utilitarian walking in urban-dwelling Canadians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Public transit, especially rail transit, shows promise as an intervention to increase utilitarian walking at the population level. Cross-sectional studies have shown that individuals who use public transit walk 8 to 24 minutes more per day than those who do not (Rissel et al., 2012). However, to our knowledge, no longitudinal study examining long-term effects of public rail transit exposure on utilitarian walking has been carried out. Goal: A retrospective cohort study was performed to investigate how investments in public transit in urban areas in Canada influenced utilitarian walking (i.e. walking to work, school or to run errands) in adults. The study had two objectives: (1) to identify and geocode new rail transportation infrastructure in urban Canada between 1994 and 2010 and link this information to respondent information from the National Population Health Survey (NPHS), a longitudinal health survey of more than 17,000 Canadians; and 2) to characterize the utilitarian walking profiles of NPHS respondents who were exposed to rail transit investment within walking distances of their home neighbourhoods. Methods: Data came from the Canadian NPHS, a biennial survey carried out between 1994 and 2010. A geographic information system was used to identify NPHS participants living in a Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) where a new rail station (light rail, subway or commuter rail) was built during the survey's timespan. Levels of utilitarian walking were compared over time (before and after new stations opened) in individuals living 2,000 meters or less from new rail transit. Distance from the station was used as a measure of exposure to new transit. A mixed-effect logistic regression model compared the odds of walking one or more hours per week when exposed (living less than 2000 meters) to a new station compared with not being exposed (living more than 2,000 meters from the new station within a Census Metropolitan Area (CMA)). For respondents who were exposed to transit, a sensitivity analysis comparing levels of utilitarian walking at different distances from the station (0-800 meters, 801-1,000 meters, 1,001-1,500 meters and 1,501-2,000 meters) was carried out.Results: Between 1994 and 2010, 84 new rail stations were built within 2,000 meters of NPHS participants' households. A total of 5,428 NPHS participants lived in a CMA with a new station: 414 lived within 2,000 meters while 5,014 lived at more than 2,000 meters. There was an increase of approximately 3% in the proportion of respondents reporting one or more hours of utilitarian walking per week after exposure to new rail transit, although this increase was not statistically significant. Individuals living within 2,000 meters from a new transit investment had 20% higher odds of engaging in one or more hours of utilitarian walking per week than individuals who lived more than 2,000 meters from new urban transit investments (univariate regression: OR 1.19, 95% Confidence Interval (CI) (1.00, 1.41)). The relationship between utilitarian walking and exposure to new transit was no longer significant when adjusted for neighborhood walkability (multivariate regression adjusting for age, sex, education level, self-rated health, physical activity level in leisure time and neighborhood walkability: OR 1.18, 95% CI 0.99, 1.40). Within those exposed to a new station, those living closest to the new rail transit investments (i.e., ⤠800m) showed the largest increase in levels of utilitarian walking, but this difference did not reach statistical significance.Conclusions: There were modest detectable increases in utilitarian walking profiles of those exposed to new rail transit investment in Canada between 1994 and 2010. Longitudinal evidence generally supports cross-sectional research findings and provides further support for the physical activity benefits of public transportation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".